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Problem in the area of speech synthesis research is that synthetic speech generally sounds unnatural. Artificially generated speech lacks the smoothness of natural speech, and this in turn can hinder intelligibility. Natural sounding synthetic speech can be generated by modeling inflection, modeling the glottal source, improving techniques of concatenating segments of speech, and modeling the temporal nuances of phrasing. Computer models of the human voice-production system are an important research tool for speech scientists and engineers. This paper uses physiological data to model human vocal tract to tackle above mentioned problem. Main focus is on piece-wise cylindrical model of the human vocal tract, since it is a relatively simple (in theory), and is capable of producing good results and most natural sounding speech synthesis. And it attempts to describe the comparison between different numbers of segments used to model vocal tract. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has been demonstrated that there seem to be non-linguistic patterns from which listeners refer to the appearance of a speaker. This study completes the collected voice parameters, which count so far as indicators of physical attributes and as factors for voice attractiveness. Since scientists tend to prefer male voices for such analyses this one is based on female voices and both-gendered judges. 20 female voices were played to 102 listeners, 52 male and 50 female. Because of different rating strategies of female and male listeners, the group specific rating strategies were compared; a bimodal rating dispersion was assumed and mostly proved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Laryngeal reinnervation is a logical approach to treating laryngeal paralysis. There continues to be some exciting work in this field, and our ability to treat patients with unilateral or bilateral vocal fold paralysis continues to improve. The clinical studies underway may eventually provide guidance as to optimum utilization of these techniques in the management of our patients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on Cepstral analysis which is a procedure to study the nature of speech and to develop speech processing technologies in various ways. The two components of speech, the excitation source and the vocal tract response, are sufficiently different in their spectral features. In the cepstrum, the cepstra of the excitation source and the vocal tract resonance are additively combined since the inverse discrete Fourier Transform (IDFT) is a linear operation. Thus, the cepstral analysis of a speech signal is a series of operations consisting of windowing, DFT, absolute operation, logarithmic transformation, and IDFT.